A Review of Cyber Securities in Smart Grid Technology

Abstract

A Smart Grid (SG) is an electrical infrastructure much like legacy power grid with scalable and pervasive two-way communications, timely control capabilities, large scale integration of distributed resources and efficient use of resources. The SG provides the features of pervasive smart monitoring technologies, automatic equipment fault sensing and self-healing. The features like ‘Wireless Automatic Meter Reading’ (WAMR), monitoring of power system stability, distributed energy resources optimization and applications of Demand Response system makes it intelligent infrastructure. Given some of these salient features, SGs without any doubt are the future power infrastructure of energy world. A smart grid has ability to connect millions of consumers and devices in a network which demand it to be highly robust, reliable and secure. Security is considered as one of the major challenges in the present-day smart grid systems because of its long-range communication on open networks. Cybercriminals, hackers, terrorists are trying to attack this national infrastructure due to their malicious intensions or to get control on the automated energy monitoring and remote controlling for personal gains. This review paper offers a comprehensive survey of understanding of Smart Grids, architecture of SGs, methodologies used, the communication protocols but the focus is mainly on the cyber-attacks carried out and solutions recommended on the smart grids. We finally discuss the various challenges in cyber security, the issues that still exist in the literature and current solution space with future research gap.